The protagonist has to face insurmountable odds. Pressure needs to sneak in from different angles to test his skills and strengths before he saves the day. The pressure applied by the antagonist should bend, but never break, the hero. There should always be one, and only one, helpless person in the story, and that’s the reader.

Villains come in many forms such as monsters, people, aliens, mental disorders, ghosts, and relatives. Villains provide the conflict a story needs to be entertaining and interesting. Here are the top 10 ways to create a truly vile villain.

1. Perform the introduction and follow up interviews with the villain. In order to develop villains that are credible, believable, and logical, you must know them as well as you know your hero.
2. Thoroughly explain throughout your story the villain’s motives and why he feels his actions are justified and rational.
3. Explain your villain physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Make him a three-dimensional and complete person.
4. Show your readers that the villain has the power and resources to destroy the hero. Make the villain very threatening.
5. Do not allow the villain to see himself as evil, insane, stupid, or whiny. People don’t typically view themselves this way, and it will destroy the villain’s credibility if he views himself this way.
6. Keep the plot uncertain. Never make it look like either side is definitely going to win. Suspense intensifies a story and pulls the reader in more effectively than any other tool.
7. Use the villain to showcase the hero’s qualities. The perceived power of the hero is strongly correlated to the villainy demonstrated by the villain.
8. Strengthen the villain by giving him a chance to present his case while demonstrating his intelligence, logic, and adaptability.
9. Give the villain traits most people hate or loathe about themselves or society at large. This allows the reader to understand and relate to the villain’s motives.
10. Give the villain normal or even likable traits that are demonstrated by average people. Doing so will strengthen the plot and the characters by creating an inner conflict within the reader who despises what the villain is doing, while at the same time relating to and possibly even liking him.

Do you want to know how vile your villains are? Join Review Fuse and let our community critique your work.

Jacob

Developing characters is difficult. Here are the top 10 things you have to get right in order to develop great characters.

1. Characters must act naturally within the context of the story and setting.
2. Readers must be able to identify with and admire the characters.
3. The protagonist must be heroic, logical, have common sense, face complicated problems, and have worthy goals.
4. Characters need to struggle to overcome conflict. Characters that sometimes fail are easy to identify with. Conflict is the backbone of a story, so make your characters really struggle.
5. Characters should be well rounded physically, emotionally, and spiritually. If any of these three dimensions are missing the characters will feel either hollow or forced.
6. Possess universal traits such as love, hate, fear, guilt, grief, and embarrassment. Everyone possesses these traits which makes it easy to relate with and understand characters with these traits.
7. A character needs flaws. Always doing the right thing for the right reason is boring and predictable. Perfect people are easy to resent and hard to love.
8. The protagonist’s greatest weakness needs to be hammered on throughout the story. This creates both internal and external conflict and establishes the plot.
9. Never let the hero back down. Despite their weaknesses heroes always find a way to face their fears.
10. Make each character a truly unique individual. Give them quirks and provide details that give us insights into who the characters really are.

If you wonder how well you have developed your characters please join our writing community and let us critique your work.

Jacob

In order to learn enough about your protagonist to effectively write about him you need to conduct a follow up interview that focuses on details you need to develop the story. This follow up may interview look short, but should take longer than the initial interview. The two questions you need to answer are:

• What major weakness undermines your protagonist’s strong personality traits?
  • The protagonist needs to be likable so avoid weaknesses that will make people permanently loathe him.
• What monstrous problem does the protagonist have to overcome?
  • The problem should prey on the weakness. The final struggle to overcome the weakness should be part of the victory of the story.
  • Remember to never let the protagonist know he is going to succeed in overcoming this weakness. Let him face a complex set of problems that require his strong personality traits to overcome the issues. Ultimately the sacrifice of his weakness should be required for him to triumph.

Your secondary characters should only have one fundamental problem to solve. Do not try to get to know your secondary characters as well as your protagonist. If you do you will be tempted to develop too many complex characters which will result in a convoluted plot.

Feel free to sign up with or upload your story to Review Fuse, our community will tell you how well your characters have been developed and give you great ideas about how to further improve your story.

Jacob

In order to understand your characters, you need to dive into their minds and pasts. I recommend mentally sitting down with your characters one at a time in order to find out the following information about each of them. Listen to your characters’ answers and watch their reactions to the questions, as reactions can often be more telling than answers.

• Name
• Age
• Hair color
• Eye color
• Height
• Favorite color
• Worst and best physical feature
• Glasses, contacts, or have perfect vision
• Hobbies and interests
• Collections
• Neat or sloppy
• Talents
• Most embarrassing moment
• Heroes
• Relationship with parents
• Vices
• Strong personality traits
• The major goal for the character in your story and why is it important
• Events from the character’s past make this goal so significant
• What your character’s life is like right now, including family situation, motivations, job, etc…

Everything about your character is worth writing down. Unusual details from character interviews have a strange way of showing up in stories, so take time to get to know your characters before you try to write an epic adventure about them.

Jacob

Have you ever noticed it is easier to write about people you know then the ones you have made up? If not, try to answer these questions about the latest fictional character in your writing as well as a friend you know very well.

1. What would the person do if someone wanted to pick a fight with him/her

2. What would the person do if someone was flirting with him/her

3. What would the person do if offered money to rob a bank

A writer needs to know his characters as well as he knows his closest friends to write compelling, realistic, and strong characters. Many authors write pages and pages of character background information for each and every character, no matter how insignificant they may be. Most of this information will never appear in their final work, but with it the author doesn’t have to think twice about what choice her characters will make when they face decisions. The choices a character make are a product of the life they have lived and the beliefs they have, without knowing this you can’t know what choices they will make.

Ask yourself the following questions about your current main character.

1. What drives your character to be good/bad/apathetic? What is their driving force?

2. What was your character’s favorite childhood memory? What was the worst?

3. Who was your character’s favorite childhood friend?

If you don’t know the answer to these simple questions, you don’t yet know your character. Once you know your characters your story will practically write itself with you standing on the side watching your characters react how you knew they would.

Steve